Oregon Coast Vacation: "Thar she blows!!"

I love whales. And dolphins. And most sea creatures. And while this doesn't top my best whale encounter (which was in Canada, seeing a pod of Orcas come extremely close to our small fishing boat and I was so excited I nearly fell out of the boat), it was still a rare, awe inspiring thing to see whales on this trip. It is gray whale season. The whales are migrating for the summer. And, we just happened to have vacationed in the "Whale watching capitol of the west coast". There are a pod of about sixty gray whales that do not continue on the summer migration. They stay in the Depoe Bay area all summer, every year.

They have a "whale watching station" that we went in, in Depoe Bay, which has volunteers to teach about the whales, and help you spot them through the many sets of binoculars they have available. We saw a few from this spot, pretty far out in the ocean. The whales will surface a time or two, and then disappear for 10-15 minutes. 

They are hard to spot, because of their color. So you have to watch for the spray of mist coming from their blow holes when they surface. It's also REALLY hard to get good pictures while you are on a super rocky boat, and trying to actually see them and not just get pictures of them. I had a LOT of pictures of the sky and the shore that had no whale in the pictures. Couldn't worry about getting the camera on the whales, or I'd miss them. They never came very far out of the water. Here are my best (not very good) shots...all taken from the boat. Look how close these whale are to the shoreline. 

You can see the spray and the long gray backs. 

 

Several times two whales at once would surface and blow. This is two sprays from a mother and baby whale. (The whale people know the whales really well, and study the same pod year after year.) 

On another day we were here, at Cape Foulweather. I know, it looks like a postcard. They sell postcards that look just like this!! But these are from my camera. I could have stood there are taken in that view for hours and hours. My family thought maybe one hour was enough. 

 

From this viewpoint at Cape Foulweather, we spotted whale!! They were pretty far away from the shore, and it was a long ways down...so again, my camera does not serve me well here. But we just searched for those sprays of mist, and sure enough, a whale would rise. The botton left picture below is a tail, which was pretty awesome. 

I saw whales from one other spot, where they had coin operated telescopes. I kept inserting quarter after quarter, going nuts about seeing whales so close up. I wish my camera could have caught the telescope view. Incredible!! We ended up seeing whales from four locations throughout the week.
And...we saw lots of these little guys too.